Do Teachers Really Get the Summers Off?
Now don’t get all ruffled up just because the title is already making you upset that I would ever get months off just because I am a teacher. I have heard it all: the sighs, the must be nice comments, the eye rolls, the maybe I should change jobs. We have all seen the movies with over the top teachers going above and beyond, fighting the injustices of the streets and the ones with the liquor hid in the bottoms of drawers. But seriously, summer is a sweet, sweet thing in the heart of a teacher.
Everyone asked me what plans I had and what cool things I hoped to do and my answer, every time, was nothing. I don’t want plans, man. I want to wake up when I wake up. I want to eat what I want, when I want. I want to stay up late reading Stephen King and I want to spend my days in bed watching Fixer Upper. My life revolves around constant planning. Why would I plan my summer? So, that’s what I have done for two weeks: nothing.
What’s worse is that my personality type is INFJ. That means, in short, that I am an extremely private, sensitive, perfectionist with a cause. Teaching is exhausting for me. I am overwhelmed emotionally, physically, and mentally every single day. I deal with nearly 200 people daily and many of them are giant, crazy huge causes that I don’t even know where to begin to help, but I am supposed to really focus on helping them write sentences and learn about gerunds.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am a champion teacher and I will fight for those kids who really don’t know why they are there every day. I will do cartwheels, every fifteen minutes, because that’s their attention span, to get their attention. I will do whatever it takes to help them see the world around them and hope that they understand that somehow they are a part of it. I will tell jokes and dance on the daily to help them learn how to speak and act and write like a human. And I work my butt off to do it even though every single day I want to stay home with my two Weimaraners.
Do you know what is really sad? That entire time, those two whole weeks I have had off, do you know what else I did, inbetween the house lift episodes and cereal lunches? I was on freaking Pinterest. I was looking up classroom team building exercises and lesson plans. I was reading Literary Theory books and figuring out how to incorporate Literature and Media Theory into my lectures next April. I went to IKEA and bought posters for my classroom. I also can’t stop thinking about my classroom calendar that needs to be finished for August. So, yeah, I made that too.
So, while I live off of the money I put away for the summer, because we don’t actually get paid for our summers off, I was working. For free. I still have a few weeks off but those are going to be mixed with three different trainings I have to attend to prepare for work. I may go to the beach or maybe go camping here or there — on the weekends because that’s when my husband is off — but mostly, I plan to sit here with my dogs and read some books.
